


Ecdysis

by Brightwinged



Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Gen, Multi, Post-Game(s), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-17 07:23:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5859625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightwinged/pseuds/Brightwinged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“All right,” Zaveid says, once Mikleo lapses back into silence.  He ticks the talking points off on his fingers.  “So, he’s not dead, he didn’t fail, and you’re saying -- I</i> think <i>you’re saying -- that he’s just a liiittle bit tainted right now.  Two point five out of three ain’t bad, right?”</i></p><p>In which Sorey returns, and absolutely nothing goes as expected.  A postgame exploration.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

In the years A.C.A. 340 to 357, Glenwood breaks out in a veritable rash of miracles. 

For one, a vast spring spouts up from the bedrock of Marlind without warning, in a spot where no water lay underground before; while drinkable and reputed to have healing powers, it stinks of sulfur and floods out the town hall, which has to be rebuilt around it. For another, the blind of Pendrago -- _all_ the blind of Pendrago, human, seraph or beast -- wake one day to confusion, perfect vision restored in their left eyes but their right still dim and dead. For yet another, travelers begin to see the ghosts of their loved ones when camping in the scattered remnants of the town of Horsa; while many of these encounters led to bittersweet closure, a few cause people to run mad.

These are just some of the most notable cases. In all they investigate, the direct blessing of a local seraphim turns out only tangential to the event, or nonexistent. The Lords of the Land in each area, when approached, can only express puzzlement. None of the few remaining powerful hellions are in the vicinity when the incidents occur, and wherever they check, malevolence has risen no higher than its usual sullen background note.

The nature of these miracles is mixed; later, they will put the pieces together and realize they were being given something of a warning. But at the time, there is no precedent for them and no obvious solution. Lailah, Edna, Zaveid and Mikleo speak amongst themselves and resolve to keep an eye out (their paths intersect more frequently than usual, all of them occupying a narrower area while they and their Shepherds investigate), but that is all they can do.

They all wonder, of course, if these are the signs of Sorey’s waking. They’ve gone about their businesses for the past few centuries with some part of their focus always on the horizon, but the talks cause them to look inward, deep, for the first time in a long time. Each of them muse on old, buried hopes.

But year after year of the strange miracles pass, and that distant light remains undimmed.

-

Lailah’s had a key to Mikleo’s door for decades, but she’s not used to cracking it open to see haphazard piles of books and half-stocked crates. 

“Oh dear, he’s finally going,” she says, hand to her mouth, and next to her Shepherd Aveline shakes her head and pushes it open the rest of the way.

“Hello to you both too,” Mikleo says, poking his head out from behind a shelf. There’s a fine film of grey dust in his hair and on his dark clothes; his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. The tall stack of papers he’s lifting wobbles a little dangerously as he carries it out, and both women move in to help; he smiles his thanks at them, small and triangular, as they get everything balanced. “The kitchen isn’t packed up just yet. If you aren’t just passing through, you’re welcome to dinner.”

“We’re headed off tomorrow evening, sir--ah, Mikleo, but we didn’t make any plans for tonight,” Aveline says softly, setting her half of the stack into the crate he indicates. She’s a recent graduate, and not always sure where to draw the line between his professorship and their being more or less colleagues now, which makes her shy. “I’d like dinner. Will you be putting all this in storage?”

“Yes, up at the institute as usual.” Mikleo dusts himself off once they’ve got more floorspace clear. “And then I’m headed up to Dineault for a while.” He catches Lailah’s eye and raises his eyebrows, clearly daring her to comment. “I’ve put it off long enough; the dispute over the excavations up there’s not getting any more resolved.”

It’s one of the rare trips that takes him so far out he can no longer see Camlann. He’s waited the longest of them all this time, fifteen years that have slid by like slow syrup, but the incidents are beginning to tail off. He’s always been nothing if not responsible in his obligations, and now this one is calling him, loud and sure.

Lailah folds scrap parchment between her fingers, and shakes her head with a smile. “I know,” she says, keeping worry out of her voice; at least he’s not _pining_ again. “I know. I’d quite like dinner too.”

-

On an otherwise rather ordinary day, months after Mikleo has left but months yet before he is due to return, the light goes out all at once. From her shrine over Reyfalke’s Normin-run library, Edna narrows her eyes at the space where it used to be. “It figures,” she informs no one in particular, and twirls her parasol between her palms.

She’s no windstepper, but column after column of stone hurtles her down the mountain and across the landscape, an incongruous yellow meteor. The last fall is right on target; it drops her gently onto the road to the sealed-off doorway to Camlann. Or rather, the formerly sealed-off doorway. It hangs open like an idiot mouth now, all the spells they laid about it in pieces.

Edna checks to see if she can retrieve some residual power from them, just out of habit. There’s none to be had: the wards are not just broken, but shattered like flawed flint. She draws her breath in through her teeth at this discovery, bouncing her parasol against her shoulder, and steps inside.

It’s just as well that she’s the first to get there. Lailah and her current posse will be much better at calming down the masses, and meanwhile she can handle the practical part, carving a path in for the others without any fuss. She’d thought she’d left enough magic to keep the caverns safe from a big shake for a thousand years, but large parts of the network are choked off with rubble and rockfalls, leaving her grumpy and even gladder to be alone. She wades impatiently through the wreckage, thrusting it to either side in neat stabilized piles, and in one area, heaves the ceiling back up and reinforces it. There are no hellions to meet her, but that at least isn’t a surprise; Edna hasn’t seen any of the small-fry ones form in a very long time.

She’s worked up an unladylike sweat by the time she reaches the cliff, so she jumps down to cool herself, wind whipping past her, her boots driving the first new footprints in three centuries into the scree. It’s not a wasteland anymore but a bee-buzzing meadow at the bottom, she notes with approval, and picks a trefoil for herself as she crosses it. She’s still fixing it in her hair-ribbon when she looks into the pit, and frowns.

There’s no one down there. It isn’t even deep anymore; there’s simply no malevolence left to create the warped abyss she remembers having to struggle up from for an age. Sunlight sheets down upon the Throne of Artorious instead, golden and ordinary, and she can make out a small heap of dry bones and rust-flakes on the stone seat. There’s a scatter of bleached scales at the opposite side of the platform too -- evidently, even great corrupted seraphim lords shed -- but the earthpulse informs her they’re old, and long undisturbed. She debates climbing down and touching them, feeling their dry reality under her hands, and the morbidity of the thought makes her lip curl in distaste. 

Edna turns on her heel and marches back instead. She catches Zaveid near the entrance, just heading in. He opens his mouth when he sees her, probably to make some crack about _ladies going first,_ and she lances him in the ribs to forestall it.

“You,” she says. “You’re clearly not doing anything important right now.”

“Oi!” Zaveid wheezes, which isn’t exactly a protest. 

“Go forth and fetch the others,” Edna smiles thinly, without humor. “Tell Meebo he’s been too Mikle-slow.”

-

Several thousand miles away, Mikleo doesn’t feel slow at all. He feels like the rest of the world’s stopped on its axis, feels his own heart’s hummingbird beat under his ribs and at his caught wrist. 

Sorey draws him up and out like he weighs nothing, and he scrambles forward the moment they’re both on level ground, wraps his arms around him, holds on tight. He’s crying even before he buries his face in Sorey’s shoulder, the other man’s features a blur going by. But oh, he _knows_ this, Sorey’s fingers curling slow over the nape of his neck, Sorey’s body solid against him, feathers tickling his cheek as Sorey hums a reassuring note into his ear. Inside Mikleo feels ice thawing, his long-held dams crumbling, flooded with joy.

“I’m back, Mikleo,” Sorey says, sounding small and strange and rough. 

Mikleo thinks nothing of it at that moment; his own voice cracks when he says, “Welcome home.”

They hang on to each other for a little while, just catching their breath. It’s only when he pulls back at last, and they look each other full in the face, that he sees there’s something wrong.

-

Zaveid tracks them down a couple of days later, in one of the little resthouses scattered all long the road back down into Hylance. He takes another hour to reconnoiter, in which a helpful breeze informs him Mikleo keeps moving about in the ground floor lobby and the person he checked in with remains firmly in their booked room. Finally he decides, hell with it, and swaggers right through the front door.

Mikleo, it turns out, is pacing along the length of the lobby and back. Zaveid’s spent more net time around him than the others in their little group, over the years, but even he hasn’t seen him that worked up since, oh, the last time they’d fought Symonne. There are blazing spots of colour in his cheeks, his mouth set, his movements controlled but telegraphing furious distress. The housemaster’s watching him nervously from behind the bar, and does not look reassured by Zaveid adding himself to the scene, even when Zaveid tips the guy a wink.

“Yo, Mikkido,” he says, and Mikleo pauses, clenches both fists, then turns to look at him. There’s no surprise on his face. “Looks like you’ve got a problem. Care to share with ol’ Zaveid?”

The words are a long-familiar litany between them now, and it’s enough to make Mikleo take a deep breath and let it out, draw a thin skin of calm back over his face. Zaveid beckons him to a seat, and waves the housemaster over to get a bottle.

“Sorey’s with me,” Mikleo begins, wrapping his fingers around the glass Zaveid pushes over. “He’s upstairs right now, sleeping. But…” 

His explanation is halting and confused, and neither it nor the booze take the tension out of his shoulders. Zaveid's starting to want a massage himself, just looking at him, but he lets him get it all out without comment.

“All right,” Zaveid says, once Mikleo lapses back into silence. He ticks the talking points off on his fingers. “So, he’s not dead, he didn’t fail, and you’re saying -- I _think_ you’re saying -- that he’s just a liiittle bit tainted right now. Two point five out of three ain’t bad, right?”

It’s the last straw, apparently; Mikleo slams one hand down on the counter. “I didn’t say he was just tainted!” he shouts. His alcohol’s a solid chunk of ice, his glass caked with frost. “He’s _part dragon!_ ” 

"Well, shit," Zaveid says.


	2. Chapter Two

“What…?” Mikleo asks, and reaches up to touch Sorey’s cheek. He wants to keep the tremble of shock out of his voice and can’t; wants to disbelieve what he’s seeing and can’t. He can feel the utter lack of give even through his glove, the slight ridges of the gleaming scales that distort one side of Sorey’s face, coat his neck raggedly down into his collar.

“It’s really me,” Sorey says, and there’s that slurred rasp muting his voice again, nothing to do with tears after all. His eyes are dry, a luminous bright gold, the left one gone slit-pupilled and unfocused, further over to the side of his head than it should be. He’s smiling down at Mikleo uncertainly, more or less; the sharp teeth filling half his jaw stretch part of his mouth into an involuntary, too-broad grimace. “I promise, all right?”

Mikleo swallows hard, drops his forehead back on Sorey’s shoulder, thumps his chest with one hand. “Sorey, you _idiot_ , I know,” he says, because it _is_ still him under the strangeness, unmistakable. Sorey’s relieved laugh sounds the same, at least, if a little hoarse.

“I dreamed you’d be in trouble, and came here first thing,” he says. “But I wasn’t sure if it had already happened...I’m glad I made it in time, Mikleo!”

Mikleo frowns at that, and he doesn’t quite let go, but he wipes his eyes on his sleeve and pushes back a little further, to get a proper look at him in the light. Sorey lets him, holding still as Mikleo reaches out to touch him more carefully.

His clothes are all over dust, fraying and torn, but mostly in one piece. Mikleo can feel scales scattered under them: hard patches on his shoulder and chest and the small of his back. But Sorey is at least still mostly person-shaped, and while Mikleo can’t make heads or tails of what he feels from him, he knows that malevolence isn’t part of it. 

The most obvious changes are around the left side of his head and his right hand, where the fingers have fused into mangled, awkward talons. His hair spills shock-white and raggedly long over his shoulders -- like Heldalf’s mane, is Mikleo’s uncomfortable thought -- and there are blunt silver _horns_ just barely poking out of it. Mikleo reaches up to touch them, feels the strange bone crest they form above Sorey’s ear, pushing his skull out of true.

“If you planned to be my shining knight,” is Mikleo’s strained verdict, “I think you got your outfits mixed up.”

Sorey’s smile goes even more crooked, and there’s so much warmth and worry in the mobile half of his face that it hurts to see. “Ah,” he says. “Yeah. This is complicated.”

-

Sorey really, really wants to tell his friends it’s not that bad. He also doesn’t want to make lying to people a thing again, though, especially not after having been away for so long. It’s true that he’s having trouble keeping his mind from wandering sometimes, and that the changed parts of him feel funny -- they don’t hurt much anymore, but they feel thick and clumsy and detached. It's been hard to keep Mikleo from dragging him to the nearest Shepherd’s Hall (Halt? he can’t remember which name’s right, but he can feel so _many_ Shepherds around when he sleeps now, like a scattering of stars) and getting him purified from head to toe, to try and fix it.

The thing is, Maotelus asked him not to let that happen, warned him it won’t even work the way Mikleo wants it to work. He even understands why, more or less. So instead of meeting other Shepherds (other Shepherds! Mikleo even teaches some of them, and he can’t remember what subject either, but it’s still amazing), they’ve been bent on getting back to Rolance ( _Hylance_ now, he reminds himself, thinking firmly of Alisha and Sergei). 

The way back is straightforward, but the seraphim-run (bar? rail? pole? some cool transport system they’ve invented, anyway) hasn’t yet been laid out this far. Mikleo had tried booking them a cart at first, but then they’d learned Sorey spooked the absolute dickens out of the horses. With no rivers for Mikleo to speed up their journey with, and Sorey unable to figure out how he’d even crossed the continent to get to Mikleo in the first place, they’ve been stuck on foot ever since--

“ _And_ he keeps falling asleep on me all of a sudden,” Mikleo tells Zaveid, bumping Sorey’s shoulder with his own, bringing him back to the present with a start. Mikleo’s tone is acerbic and his arms are folded, but he still looks kind of guilty about interrupting his nap and making him fall out of bed, so it hasn’t been that long since they came upstairs. “He’s gotten heavier.”

“I told you, it’s not my fault!” Sorey protests, raising a hand to the back of his head. “I don’t want to be sleeping more, but Maotelus said I’d need to, or else I’ll get even more unstable...” He catches the flash of upset on Mikleo’s face, the tense tilt of his body, and it prompts him to remember that it’s the hand that’s become a claw; that he shouldn’t dig his fingers in like he’s used to doing. “Sorry, that sounds worse than it is. I’m not going to blow up or anything.”

“Baby boy Maotelus told you a lot of stuff, huh.” Zaveid’s wearing a fascinated, slightly spooked expression, watching the pair of them (also an actual shirt, which Sorey finds almost as weird as Mikleo being so tall now.) “He riding along with you in there? The ladies say there ain’t a trace of him where we left the two of you, and they’re pretty good at combing down a place.”

Sorey starts to shake his head, then shrugs instead, trying to pick his words more carefully. When he’d first tried to explain to Mikleo, it had taken them . . . well, it had taken a while. He’s having the most trouble holding on to numbers.

“Maotelus told me that there are two parts to every seraphim,” he says. “One part is energy, and the other part is consciousness. The first part can change, or absorb more energy, or pass energy on to something else, but it never completely leaves this world. The second part, though...it can fade, and disappear, especially if the first part changes drastically enough.”

“I think I see where this is headed,” Zaveid says. “Like humans to seraphim, or seraphim to dragons, right?”

“Yeah.” He stares down at the sheets, some smooth modern textile he's not used to (and he’s ripped them in a couple of places; they’ll have to pay the innkeeper for them, except he doesn’t have any modern currency, whatever that is, so actually Mikleo will have to pay the innkeeper, except they’re not even called innkeepers anymore, but--)

“Sorey?”

He drags his thoughts back, reaching for Mikleo’s hand without thinking; he’s surprised when Mikleo lets him hold it, with Zaveid right there. “Maotelus still had a huge amount of energy when we met him, but once a seraph becomes a hellion, their consciousness starts to erode pretty fast. When I became his vessel I slowed that down for a while, and I took on his energy, but I couldn’t do much about his mind. We had some time to talk and work out what to do, but...as far as I can tell, it’s just me left in here, now.”

That had hurt, feeling someone he’d tried to save fade away like that, little by little. Not as much as what had happened afterward, but at least the physical pain had been for a good reason.

Zaveid reclines his chair back against the wall -- Sorey tilts his head automatically, the better to follow the movement with his dragon’s eye -- and turns his hat between his hands, gaze hooded. “And what about you, kid? Seems like you remember us all pretty well, even if you’re looking like a patchwork quilt on legs these days.”

“Zaveid!” Mikleo exclaims.

“No, he’s right.” Talking so much is making Sorey’s throat start to burn, and he knuckles awkwardly at it with his scaled hand, keeping the other one in Mikleo’s. “I still have my old memories, and what Maotelus told me, because I’m not any one thing right now. But this won’t last forever, and I don’t know what I’m going to _be_ in the end.” 

Mikleo inhales audibly, and Zaveid raises his eyebrows. “Tough deal.”

“It’s worth it,” Sorey says. “While I’m like this, we might have a chance to do something even bigger than stopping the Lord of Calamity. We might actually be able to get at the source of all malevolence in this world this time, and deal with it for good.”

-

Glaveind Basin isn’t the most ideal ground for a seismophone array, especially the more delicate transportable units. Even Edna and her attendant Normin haven’t been able to make the visual screen show anything more than amber waves and meaningless lines so far. Still, they’ve gotten the sound quality all right: she knows the boys can hear the way she’s tapping her parasol point on the ground, because Mikleo’s familiar tiny groan comes through.

“You’re late,” she says, in a perfectly flat voice. “How shameful, to leave a lady waiting without news for so long.”

There’s a familiar nervous laugh in the background, and a faint _this is so cool!_ that makes her fingers tighten on the parasol handle, but it’s Mikleo who answers first. “It’s only been a few days,” he says.

“And that would be nice, except we’re operating on human reaction times right now,” she informs him. “You should know, Professor Meebo. You have enough practice setting them _reasonable deadlines._ ”

He huffs. “You’d have been waiting even longer if you hadn’t sent Zaveid along.” He doesn’t sound as happy as she’d expected him to, but that makes sense once they start explaining what’s happened.

“You want to do what,” Edna says.

“Uh...deal with the source of all malevolence in the world, I think I said?” And then, after a stretch, “Edna, are you still there?”

“Of course I’m here,” she sniffs. “All on my lonesome, keeping nosy parkers out of your precious ruins. I’d rather thought the whole point of your long nap was _to_ deal with malevolence, Sorey.”

“He didn’t know the source wasn’t the Lord of Calamity, or Maotelus,” Mikleo cuts in sharply. “None of us knew, or had any reason to think otherwise.”

Edna pulls up a rock to sit on, a little too hard and fast, causing a burst of static in the lines. The boys are still wincing when it clears. “I wasn’t asking _you._ ”

She’s angry enough for them to hear it, she notes with distant surprise; she’d thought herself done with being angry over matters of dragons, over the conclusion they’d come to about Eizen, and promises poorly kept. How silly of her.

“Edna,” Sorey says, voice grating, “...let’s talk about this more face-to-face, all right? Could you let Lailah know we’re okay? We’ll be there soon.”

She pops her parasol open, setting it back on her shoulder and twirling it fast, faster, until she can almost hear her Normin squeak in protest. “Just hurry it up,” she says, and cuts the connection all at once.

-

Zaveid leaves them alone for the night in Kameled after they’ve placed their call -- it’s his time to hang out on the heights and catch the sights, he tells them, waggling his brows and grinning at Mikleo’s answering eyeroll. Some things never change.

Sorey isn’t tired, and doesn’t seem like he’s going to tip over into sudden sleep again, but there isn’t much to see in this town, once he’s oohed and aahed over the framework of earthen glyphs and copper arrays in the communications tower. Mikleo takes the opportunity to sit them down in their room and cut his hair instead. He tries not to pay attention to how the trimmings vanish before they hit the floor, in momentary glints of light. Sorey doesn't seem to notice, but then, his sightline's gone a little wonky.

“Mikleo,” Sorey half-laughs after a minute, squirming. “That’s _cold._ ”

“The scissors aren’t anywhere near your skin, Sorey.” He clips carefully around the triad of horns. Those are growing longer too, he notes, and wonders if they can at least be filed down painlessly.

“It’s not that.” Sorey tries to tilt his head sideways to look at him, and Mikleo gently, firmly, pushes him right back into place while he wrestles his hair back into acceptability. “It’s your hands again! Every time we go outside--”

“Oh,” Mikleo says. Oops. “Sorry, I forgot. Should I put my gloves back on?”

Sorey reaches up and grabs his hand instead of answering, which seems to be becoming a habit with him; Mikleo startles but doesn’t pull it back. When Sorey starts to chafe his fingers, he sighs and sets the scissors aside for the moment, moving to hunker down in front of him instead. At least when Sorey’s focused on him like this, Mikleo can be sure he’s really there, not drifting somewhere Mikleo can’t touch inside his head.

“This is why you started wearing them, huh?” Sorey’s human hand is still a little broader than Mikleo’s, fingers strong and square against his knuckles and the back of his palm. Mikleo never absorbs warmth quickly these days -- one of the reasons he hasn’t tried to sleep next to Sorey -- but Sorey is persistent, even bringing their joined palms up to breathe out over Mikleo’s skin. The hot air makes an undignified whistling noise through his dragon teeth, and Mikleo snorts despite himself.

“It’s not why I started,” he admits. Sorey looks down at him levelly. “...that’s a long story. But it’s why I’ve kept using them, yes. Now let me finish up your front, if this is warm enough for you.”

Sorey closes his eyes (human lid down over the right, reptile membrane sideways over the left) and sits still for the rest. Mikleo lingers over Sorey’s bangs, and both of them relax fully for the first time in days, simple and easy, while he clips them back to their old familiar length. Mikleo ties the rest back loosely once he’s finished -- he’s left it long, the better to cover the horns while they can still be covered -- and kisses Sorey’s forehead, a brief cool peck over skin and scales, to bring him back again.

Sorey reaches up to check how it feels, once he focuses. His mouth twitches. “Mikleo...did you put your feather in my hair?”

“You’re _welcome,_ ” Mikleo retorts. More heat prickles in his cheeks, pleasant and unexpected.

**Author's Note:**

> Still working on updates for this, but past a certain point I'm going to wait until I've had a chance to play Berseria to continue further, since I'd like to work with new info from that game if I can.
> 
> Character and pairing tags are subject to change.


End file.
